Subject to Change

Can Traditional Societies Survive the Power of Modernity?

Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec, in a remarkably frank interview, recently
gave official confirmation to what has long been an open secret—the devastating
decline of the Catholic Church in French Canada and the secularization of its
culture, to the point where only immigrants bring a vital religious presence
to that culture.

Visitors to Quebec Province are continually reminded—in guidebooks and
historical material—of the Silent Revolution that occurred there during
the 1960s, a combination of political separatism and the repudiation of traditional
values, including an almost complete rejection of the authority of the Catholic
Church.

Over the decade of the 1960s, church attendance declined precipitously (it
is now about five percent), the birth rate fell to one of the lowest in the
world, and every kind of sexual license was openly celebrated. The result is
surreal—historic churches and streets named for saints are ubiquitous,
but the soul has gone out of the body.

Faith or Mere Custom?

Quebec separatism at first seemed to be the Catholic side of Canadian society
asserting itself against the Protestant side, but the fact that the moral revolution
occurred in tandem with political separatism was not coincidental. Nationalism
has often served as a conscious substitute for religion, and the more the Québécois
asserted their independence from the Canadian Protestant establishment, the
less Catholic they became. (Christians should be wary of the cult of “ethnicity”—costumes,
music, language, cuisine—because it often serves precisely to fill the
vacuum created by the abandonment of belief.)

The experience of Quebec, along with that of Ireland, Spain under Francisco
Franco, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Puritan New England (earlier, the Old
Regime all over Europe), illustrates a kind of iron law of history whereby
change can only be shut out for a limited period of time and, once it breaks
in, is catastrophic roughly in proportion to how long, and how rigorously,
it has been kept out.

A closed traditional society finds it almost impossible to effect an orderly
and controlled transition to modernity. Religion dominates all aspects of life
to the extent that no distinction is made between matters of faith and mere
custom. The Quebec clergy, for example, identified the purity of religion with
rural life and a spirit of obedience, even obedience to the Protestant-dominated
British Commonwealth.

Thus, it proves psychologically impossible to discard those things in traditional
society that have outlived their legitimacy without thereby setting off global
change. The changing culture fosters a half-conscious conviction that truth
lies roughly in asserting the opposite of what one previously believed. Changes
cannot be evaluated rationally, because people are carried along by a euphoric
sense of having liberated themselves from long-standing, narrow oppressiveness.

Modern society offers an opportunity to exercise freedom in the fullest sense,
an exercise that exposes the facts that what passes for deep conviction may
be for many people merely a brittle social conformity, and what passes for
morality may be the mere absence of opportunities for sin.

Muslims who see the United States as the Great Satan reject the good of political
liberty along with the poisonous moral licentiousness that such liberty permits.
They perceive the ambiguity of modernity itself, most of which either originated
in the United States or has been propagated through American influence.

But for that very reason the antibodies to modern cultural viruses also exist
most robustly in the United States, which is practically the only society in
the Western world where moral traditionalists have an effective voice in public
affairs.

Religious belief is stronger in America than anywhere else in the West partly
because believers have had to find ways of living their faith without the kind
of social supports that, historically, were provided in countries with established
churches.

A Conundrum

Certain perhaps melancholy conclusions have to be drawn from all this, the
chief of which is that the forces of modernity—political, economic, and
cultural—really are irresistible and that sooner or later almost every
society in the world will have to face them. (Not too many years ago, conservative
American Catholics talked about moving to Ireland to escape American decadence.)

If that assumption is correct, it is better to experience modernity sooner
rather than later, in order to make use of what is good in it and to learn
to cope with what is bad. Simple quarantine is no longer possible.

There is a melancholy personal parallel here as well, in the attempt by families
to protect themselves as far as possible from a decadent society by teaching
their children at home, banishing television, and other measures. Such strategies
are wise in many ways, but ultimately, it is impossible to arrange one’s
life in such a way as to avoid all the realities of the culture.

Indeed, many families who homeschool their children and avoid television are
aware of this impossibility. They know they cannot create a closed subculture
like the Amish but are modestly trying to revive, or keep alive, some kind
of Christian culture. As parents, they are not content simply to allow others
to decide what a child should grow to love and to see as normal.

Both for societies and for individuals, our cultural situation is tragic in
the classical sense, because it requires decisions none of which are free of
possible bad consequences. Maintaining a rigorously closed society may protect
generations of people from the worst evils of modernity, even as it virtually
guarantees that later generations will be infected all the more virulently.
But alternatively, allowing people a good measure of freedom inevitably leads
to abuse.

One of the oldest and deepest assumptions of Western civilization is that
the unexamined life is not worth living, and it is a perplexing theological
conundrum to what extent real faith exists if the possibility of rejecting
it does not exist also.

—James Hitchcock, for the editors

James Hitchcock is Professor of History at St. Louis University in St. Louis. He and his wife Helen have four daughters. His most recent book is the two-volume work, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life (Princeton University Press, 2004). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

“Subject to Change” first appeared in the January/February 2009 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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